KRMF Significant Cases

A federal court has issued an important decision allowing KRMFL’s client, Shaurn Thomas, to present his wrongful conviction claims to a federal jury.   Thomas was convicted for the 1990 murder of Domingo Martinez.  But he was innocent. Thomas was incarcerated for twenty-four years until his exoneration.  In 2017, he sued the City of Philadelphia and two […]

A federal court in Philadelphia issued an important decision on May 15, 2019, allowing civil rights claims on behalf of KRMFL client James Dennis to go forward. Dennis’s case is an extraordinary one. In 1992, he was convicted and sentenced to death for a murder that he did not commit. For years, Dennis challenged his

Last month, the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed a history of disturbing violence, abuse, and cover-ups at Glen Mills, the Delaware County reform school that had long been regarded as a model for similar schools. On February 25, the Inquirer reported that Philadelphia County would remove all of its students from the school; and on March 25,

In two separate opinions issued on February 13, 2019 and February 20, 2019, Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan of the Western District of Pennsylvania denied motions to dismiss as to all defendants in KRMFL’s lawsuit alleging that intentional constitutional violations by officers of multiple law enforcement agencies caused the wrongful prosecution, conviction, and quarter-century imprisonment

KRMFL filed a lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of a man who was falsely accused and convicted of unlawful firearm possession as a result of former detective Philip Nordo’s outrageous misconduct. On February 19, a grand jury issued a presentment accusing Nordo, a former detective in the Philadelphia Police Department’s Homicide Division, of multiple counts of

KRMFL and the ACLU of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit today against a magisterial district judge and a court officer who detained a lawful permanent resident from Guatemala on his wedding day. On May 23, 2017, Alex Parker, who was born in Guatemala and has lived in the United States since his infancy, and Krisha Schmick,

KRMFL, in cooperation with the National Immigrant Justice Center, American Immigration Council, and Arnold & Porter, filed legal claims today on behalf of six asylum-seeking families who were separated at the southern border. The families were victims of the Trump administration’s cruel and illegal family separation policy. The separation policy subjected the mothers and their

Following last week’s report on the frequency of unconstitutional stops and frisks by the Philadelphia Police Department, counsel for plaintiffs in Bailey v. City of Philadelphia released a report today demonstrating that racial disparities continue to plague those stop and frisk practices. In every neighborhood in Philadelphia, Black pedestrians were stopped by police officers at

A report filed today by counsel for plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit challenging unconstitutional practices of the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) shows that thousands of people were stopped and frisked without reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct in the first six months of 2018. The report, which rises out of a 2011 consent decree in

As outlined in a recent press release and article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, plaintiffs’ counsel announced a proposed landmark settlement in a class action lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections that, if approved, will provide much-needed medical treatment for thousands of prisoners with Chronic Hepatitis C. In 2014, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, Kairys, Rudovsky,